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People’s active interventions play a key role in causal learning. Past studies have tended to focus on how interventions help people learn relationships where causes are independently sufficient to produce an effect. In reality, however, people can learn different rules governing how multiple causes combine to produce an effect, i.e., different functional forms. These forms are examples of causal overhypotheses—abstract beliefs about causal relationships that are acquired in one situation and transferred to another. Here we present an active &quot;blicket&quot; experiment to study whether and how people learn overhypotheses in an active setting. Our results showed participants can learn disjunctive and conjunctive overhypotheses through active training, as measured in a new disjunctive task. Furthermore, intervening on two objects led to better conjunctive judgments, and complementarily, conjunctive training predicted more objects in future interventions. Overall, these results expand our understanding of how active learning can facilitate causal inference.

CogSci 2021

Exploring Causal Overhypotheses in Active Learning

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**Dear Colleagues,**

Welcome to the 43rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society! 

This year’s conference brings together the latest research from all Cognitive Science and also highlights this year’s theme **Comparative Cognition: Animal Minds.** 

The program features four plenary speakers: Friederike Range (University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna), Onur Güntürkün (Ruhr University Bochum), Julia Fischer (University of Göttingen), and Erich Jarvis (The Rockefeller University). The keynotes and invited symposia showcase the broad spectrum of ideas that encompass the conference theme of comparative cognition. 

Further, the program includes the Rumelhart Prize keynote presentation by Susan Goldin-Meadow (University of Chicago), and symposia to celebrate the winner of the Elman Prize: Wei Ji Ma (New York University), the Heineken Award winner Robert Zatorre (McGill University), and the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prizes session.

The program committee for CogSci 2021 received 1,025 submissions, including 710 full papers, 275 member abstracts, 8 publication-based talks, as well as 15 proposals for symposia, and 17 for workshops and tutorials. After a rigorous review process, the committee selected 152 papers for oral presentation and inclusion in the conference proceedings (14.8%), 332 papers for poster presentation and inclusion in the proceedings (32.4%), and 175 papers for poster presentation with inclusion of abstracts in the proceedings (17.1%) We also selected 275 submitted member abstracts. In addition, we accepted 6 publication-based talks, 12 symposia, and 9 workshops and tutorials to make for an exciting and inclusive program.

We hope that you enjoy the conference this year!<br><br>

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**Learn more about the Vienna Cognitive Science Hub at the University of Vienna, hosts of CogSci 2021**

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The Cognitive Science Society brings together researchers from around the world who hold a common goal: understanding the nature of the human mind. The mission of the Society is to promote Cognitive Science as a discipline, and to foster scientific interchange among researchers in various areas of study, including Artificial Intelligence, Linguistics, Anthropology, Psychology, Neuroscience, Philosophy, and Education. The Society is a non-profit professional organization and its activities include sponsoring an annual conference and publishing the journals Cognitive Science and TopiCS.

People’s active interventions play a key role in causal learning. Past studies have tended to focus on how interventions help people learn relationships where causes are independently sufficient to produce an effect. In reality, however, people can learn different rules governing how multiple causes combine to produce an effect, i.e., different functional forms. These forms are examples of causal overhypotheses—abstract beliefs about causal relationships that are acquired in one situation and transferred to another. Here we present an active "blicket" experiment to study whether and how people learn overhypotheses in an active setting. Our results showed participants can learn disjunctive and conjunctive overhypotheses through active training, as measured in a new disjunctive task. Furthermore, intervening on two objects led to better conjunctive judgments, and complementarily, conjunctive training predicted more objects in future interventions. Overall, these results expand our understanding of how active learning can facilitate causal inference.

poster

Are Goffin’s cockatoos capable of transferring a tool-use skill acquired in a certain situation to a new contextual setting on which they have no previous experience? In our study, performance of thirteen adult subjects (divided into two groups: experimental or control) was compared in a two-stage experiment where the learning component about the tool was manipulated by providing a more diverse training for the experimental group in stage one. We hypothesized that this broader learning of the tool's affordances would enable to transfer its use to solve a novel task. Our results show that the experimental group outperformed the control group in stage two (higher success rate and faster learning speed), which we interpret as a product of behavioural flexibility being enhanced during stage one: by operating the tool in more diverse contexts, these individuals might have acquired an advantageous experience, transferrable to tackle an untrained problem more efficiently.

Knowledge transfer for tool use in the Goffin's cockatoo

Experimental design and computational modelling across the cognitive sciences often rely on measures of semantic similarity between words/concepts. Traditional measures of semantic similarity typically rely on corpus-derived linguistic distributional similarity (e.g. LSA) or distance in taxonomic databases (e.g. WordNet), which are theoretically problematic in their lack of grounding in sensorimotor experience. We present a new measure of sensorimotor similarity between concepts, based on multidimensional comparisons of their experiential strength across 11 perceptual and action-effector dimensions in the Lancaster Sensorimotor norms. We demonstrate that, in modelling human similarity and relatedness judgements, sensorimotor similarity has comparable explanatory power to LSA and WordNet distance, explains variance in human judgements which is missed by other measures, and does so with the advantages of remaining both fully grounded and computationally efficient. We further introduce a web-based tool for easily calculating and visualising sensorimotor similarity between words, featuring coverage of nearly 800 million word pairs.

Sensorimotor similarity: A fully grounded and efficient measure of semantic similarity

Decades of empirical and theoretical research on human decision-making has broadly categorized it into two, separate realms: decision-making under risk and decision-making under uncertainty, with the Allais paradox and the Ellsberg paradox being a prominent example of each, respectively. In this work, we present the first unified, resource-rational account of these two paradoxes. Specifically, we show that Nobandegani et al.’s (2018) sample-based expected utility model provides a unified, process-level account of the two variants of the Allais paradox (the common-consequence effect and the common-ratio effect) and the Ellsberg paradox. Our work suggests that the broad framework of resource-rationality could permit a unified treatment of decision-making under risk and decision-making under uncertainty, thus approaching a unified account of human decision-making.

A Unified, Resource-Rational Account of the Allais and Ellsberg Paradoxes

Recent work has demonstrated robust learning traps during learning from experience – decision-making biases that persist due to the choice-contingent nature of outcome feedback. In two experiments, we investigate the effect of outcome valence on learning trap development. Participants chose to approach or avoid category exemplars associated with rewards or losses, and, to maximize reward, must learn a categorization rule based on two stimulus dimensions. We replicate previous findings showing that when outcome feedback was contingent upon approaching exemplars, people frequently fell into the trap of using an incomplete categorization rule based on only a single dimension, which was suboptimal for long-term reward. Notably, learning trap development was attenuated in an environment with frequent loss outcomes, even when participants received explicit information about the base rates of gains and losses. The implications of these findings for theoretical models and future research are discussed.

Can losses help attenuate learning traps?

Neural representations for faces, bodies, and objects have been studied extensively in humans. However, much less is known on how our socio-cognitive niche shaped the evolution of these neural bases. Canine neuroscience allows us to close this gap by studying a longstanding, close companion of humans. Here, we study the neural underpinnings of face, body and object processing in pet dogs (Canis familiaris) and humans. Fifteen awake and unrestrained dogs and forty humans underwent MRI scanning and viewed faces, bodies, objects, and scrambled images. Preliminary results for the dogs indicate temporal regions selective for animate stimuli and a potentially distinct sub-region selective for bodies, and replicate previous findings of category-selective regions in humans. Investigating the multivariate patterns of activation indicates similar categorical object representations in both species. Our findings will provide insights into the potentially convergent evolution of a core cognitive skill in the dog and human brain.

Face, body and object representations in the human and dog brain

Enhanced behavioural flexibility has been linked to relatively large brain size and social complexity. Aras exhibit both properties. We tested parrots of A. ambiguus and A. glaucogularis in a serial reversal learning paradigm, in which all the individuals completed an acquisition, and 10 reversal learning phases. Behavioural flexibility (and thus learning performance) was measured as the number of errors per trial. We also conducted social observations on individuals’ social interactions. We found that both species made significantly fewer errors per trial during each reversal phase and over the course of ten reversal phases. All individuals gradually developed a generalised learning strategy i.e., ‘win-stay-loose-shift’, and thus showing ‘learning to learn efficiently’. Our results also support the Social Intelligence Hypothesis whereby individuals’ learning performance was positively related to social interaction. These results show that the two Ara species demonstrate behavioural flexibility, and social complexity provides one explanation for varied individual learning performance.

Serial reversal learning using a colour discrimination task in two Ara species

Recent research has found evidence for implicit theory of mind, suggesting that humans quickly and involuntarily compute the mental states of others. One highly influential task within this literature, known as the Dot Perspective Task (DPT), purports to demonstrate implicit visual-perspective taking within adult subjects. However, some studies, consisting of variations of the DPT, have challenged these findings suggesting that the DPT does not demonstrate genuine perspective taking. Instead, they argue that these results are reflective of simple attentional cueing. Additionally, some researchers have argued that the DPT is sensitive to unintended attentional and intentional factors. We report the preliminary findings of an on-ongoing meta-analysis which analyzes participant-level data from 23 experiments and 1381 individual subjects. We find evidence for both directional cueing and implicit perspective taking within the DPT, although the effects of directional cueing are significantly larger. Additionally, we find that the effects of perspective taking are sensitive to attentional and intentional factors. These results cast doubt upon much of the evidence which has been taken to demonstrate implicit theory of mind. At the same time, they suggest that future work may utilize a carefully controlled version of the DPT in order to measure genuine implicit theory of mind more accurately.

Do you see what I see? A meta-analysis of the Dot Perspective Task

Research suggests that the perception of attractiveness is multimodal, however, it is unclear how visual and auditory cues interact. Voice pitch seems important, as men judge high-pitched female voices to be more attractive, possibly due to their association with youthfulness, fertility, and femininity. We investigated whether an increase in voice pitch in female voices would lead to increased ratings of attractiveness, femininity, and health, and decreased age ratings. In a within-subject design we found higher-pitched female voices were rated more attractive, more feminine, and younger, but not healthier compared to non-manipulated voices. However, when manipulated and control voices were presented simultaneously with synchronized face videos, voice manipulations did not affect the ratings of the faces. These results support the multiple-message hypothesis that voices and faces signal different aspects of an individual’s overall quality. Further experiments will have to examine the effect of face attractiveness manipulations on voice ratings.

The influence of pitch manipulation in female speakers on perceived voice and face attractiveness

Labels may play a role in the formation and acquisition of object categories. We investigated this using a free-categorization task, manipulating the presence or absence of labels and whether labels were random or reinforced one of two alternative categorization cues (taxonomic or thematic relationships). When labels were absent, participants used thematic and taxonomic cues equally to categorize stimuli. When present, labels were used as the primary cue for category formation, with random labels leading participants to attend less to taxonomic and thematic relations between stimuli. When labels redundantly reinforced either thematic or taxonomic cues, the use of the cue in question was boosted along with the use of labels as a cue for categorization. Most interestingly, in spite of previously observed associations between labels and taxonomic grouping, labels did not preferentially boost the use of either taxonomic or thematic cues in comparison with the other.

Labels, Even Arbitrary Ones, Facilitate Categorization

According to a long-standing dogma, Westerners are more capable of thinking abstractly than East Asians. Here, we challenge this generalization by comparing US and Chinese adults in a paradigm case of abstract thinking: analogy. Chinese and American participants completed the most difficult set of Raven’s (2003) Standard Progressive Matrices (SPM), a widely used test of analogical reasoning. For each item, participants attempted to discern the analogical relationships between parts of an incomplete matrix to identify the correct way to complete it. Chinese participants produced significantly more correct answers on the SPM, indicating more successful analogical reasoning. We replicated this result with a second sample of Chinese participants. This cross-cultural difference remained significant when demographic factors were controlled. We predicted this difference, reasoning that East Asian’s sensitivity to context gives them an advantage over Westerners in various kinds of abstract thinking.

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Knowledge transfer for tool use in the Goffin's cockatoo

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